Jamie Oliver – when the oven gloves come off

Is the ambitious chef starting to rue having so many pots on the boil?

If you look very closely, halfway through the 1997 documentary Christmas at the River Café, you might just spot him. There, in the foreground, are Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray, whipping up home-made mince pies with all their trademark charm and bluster. In the background is a young, blond, chubby-cheeked chef, breezily chopping and stirring and hopping between bubbling saucepans.

With his shaggy hair and creased chef’s whites, he might have looked more at home on a skateboard than in a professional kitchen – but, for the producers watching, he was just what they’d been waiting for. The day after his debut, that young chef was contacted by five production companies who wanted him to front his own show. Within a year, he had his first series, The Naked Chef – and the Jamie Oliver brand was born.

Fifteen years later, Oliver has starred in 23 television shows that have been screened in 40 countries. He has written 15 cookery books (selling 30 million copies), a best-selling magazine (which recently doubled its print run) and has 38 restaurants around the world, from Amsterdam to Dubai, serving 100,000 customers a week. His personal wealth is estimated at £150 million, making him the 501st richest person in Britain. And it doesn’t stop there: Oliver’s empire includes cookery schools, community food gardens, sell-out live shows, smartphone apps, wood-fired ovens, home fragrances, a range of kitchen utensils, a catering company and a computer game.

Oliver, now 37, has built a career out of his unique brand of cheeky-chappy cooking. This week he was pictured on a walkabout with the Prince of Wales, chummily goading him about being a “hippy” for wanting a pet pig. Admirers have likened him to Elizabeth David, a modern-day food evangelist who has more in common with Bob Geldof than Gordon Ramsay. His high-profile campaign to improve school meals catapulted him on to the political scene, where he garnered overwhelming cross-party support. Despite a recent falling out with the Education Secretary, Michael Gove, whom he claims “does not understand food in schools”, Oliver’s star shows no sign of dimming. Recent activities include addressing the UN, appearing on Oprah, cooking for Brad Pitt, starring in an Australian TV ad and receiving an MBE.

So how did the likely lad from Essex – who left school at 16 with two GCSEs – transform himself into a heroic food campaigner, friend of the Royal family and adviser to leaders of state? With so many pots on the boil, has he been over-ambitious?

Untangling the strands of Oliver’s sprawling empire is no easy task. An initial internet search results in a recipe for his “empire chicken”, a spiced bird served with “sizzling roasties”. His website, jamieoliver.com, is similarly confusing: the home page alone has 79 different menu tabs. As his mentor, the Italian chef Gennaro Contaldo, said earlier this year: “Jamie… scares me sometimes. I am afraid because he has a new idea and 'bam’, he wants to do it right now… he doesn’t know when to stop.”

Brand Oliver started with Fifteen, the restaurant-cum-charitable-foundation he set up in London in 2002, televised as Jamie’s Kitchen, in which he trained disadvantaged youths to become chefs. This year, the project celebrated its 10th anniversary, with sister restaurants now open in Cornwall and Amsterdam (another, in Melbourne, closed after a fire in 2008). Andy Appleton, who met Oliver in 2005 when he started work in the kitchens of Fifteen London, says the chef remains a hands-on boss. “Jamie and I chat when we need to. He comes every year for our graduation ceremony, we send him menus – and we hear when something isn’t right. He’s very much involved.”

In order to run his other British ventures – among them Jamie’s Italian, Recipease cookery school and Fabulous Feasts catering – Oliver has surrounded himself with a tightly knit group of executives who are crucial to his success. He is advised by Sir Richard Branson (John Jackson, chief executive of Jamie Oliver Holdings, admits the company is largely based on the Virgin business model) and fashion designer Paul Smith. Louise Holland, his “right-hand woman”, has been at his side since the late Nineties. Other loyal employees include managing director Tara Donovan and PR adviser Peter Berry. “Jamie is pretty canny about business,” says Tom Weldon, Penguin UK chief executive, who has known Oliver since 1997 when he published his first recipe book. “He has hired some great people; he’s good at picking who he wants around him. His empire is stretched but it is still all about food; he’s clever like that. His level of commitment has always remained the same: he writes every word of his books himself and he’s interested in the printing, the photography, the art direction.”

In 2005, after running a school kitchen in Greenwich for his documentary Jamie’s School Dinners, Oliver began a campaign to get Turkey Twizzlers banned from primary menus. Tony Blair pledged £280 million, spread over three years, to Oliver’s cause – and the chef was named ''Most Inspiring Political Figure’’ by Channel 4. “He remains extraordinarily passionate about food and he’s never moved away from that,” explains Weldon. “That’s why he’s still going.”

But Oliver’s gilded success came to a halt last year, when his mission to transform school dinners in America fell flat. Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution ran for two seasons and pulled in audiences of 7.5 million – but it was cancelled in 2011 due to lack of commercial support. Despite winning an Emmy, the show was blasted by critics (the Washington Post labelled it “reality TV pap”) and ended with Oliver sobbing on camera.

Recent experiences back home have also left him feeling battered. In July, Henry Dimbleby and John Vincent, founders of the restaurant chain Leon, were appointed to lead a government review of school dinners – a choice seen by many as a slap in the face for Oliver. He believes Gove has pulled back on improvements made in 2005, including scrapping nutritional standards for academy schools and stopping data collection on the number of meals

eaten. “He doesn’t care… he’s obsessed with reducing red tape,” Oliver said of Gove this week, adding that he plans to keep his head down for a few years – and then “I’ll be ready to bang on doors again”.

The chef’s businesses are valued at £110 million, in which Oliver and his wife, Jools, hold a £77 million stake. The couple, who have four children, own a £7.5 million mansion in Primrose Hill and a house in Clavering, Essex. Until he broke from Sainsbury’s in 2011 (amid speculation that he was too busy), Oliver earned an estimated £2 million a year from his promotion deal with the supermarket. His latest venture, contracting agents to sell his Jamie at Home cookware range at parties, is booming. But it hasn’t always been like this. He remortgaged his family home to raise capital for Fifteen and had to borrow money from friends to launch Jamie’s Italian after banks turned down his loan request.

Clare Vickers, who works at Fifteen Cornwall, says the restaurant is part of the wider “Jamie Effect”, with business akin to a social enterprise project and staff members treated like “part of the family”.

“He’s never lost touch with his original aims. The reason we’ve been successful is because Fifteen has always been foremost in his agenda. He cares a lot for his staff.”

Yet some people aren’t convinced. Fellow chefs are sceptical of Oliver’s “good work”, pointing out the unhappy clash between his saintly food ethos and his steely business sense. Clarissa Dickson Wright accused him of being a “force for spin” and a “whore” for promoting farmed Scottish salmon in a 2004 Sainsbury’s advert. One writer who interviewed Oliver was similarly unimpressed. “He’s a showman,” she says. “As soon as he walked away from the crowds, he seemed to switch off that side of his personality. I can’t say I found him nearly as engaging as he is on our TV screens.”

The problem critics have with Oliver is that he’s notoriously difficult to define. Chef? Politician? Entrepreneur? Philanthropist? And many are scornful of his repeated rants against Gove: what right, they ask, does a celebrity chef have to be indignant about the Government’s school meals policy? Appleton, now head chef at Fifteen Cornwall, says Oliver can get upset when his plans don’t work out. “He gets frustrated. He doesn’t understand why they can’t just go and change it.”

So what next for the unstoppable Oliver? For now, perhaps it’s time he stopped juggling so many projects and went back into the kitchen; the place where his hotch-potch empire started out. “It would be nice if he spent more time here,” admits Appleton, “but he’s a very busy man.”